It’s true that my hometown didn’t find itself underwater this summer like certain cities in Pakistan, a country which experienced flooding of a kind unknown in its history, nor was mine, like Moscow, enveloped in a pall of choking smoke from out of control wildfires, thanks to a heat wave the likes of which hadn’t previously been seen in Russia. In my city, there were no massive wildfires, no Xtreme hurricanes, and no unprecedented global warming-ish visual spectaculars like the calving off of a nearly 100-square mile iceberg in Greenland, four times the size of my town and the likes of which had not been seen in the Arctic for half a century. No, in New York City, it was merely, grindingly, ploddingly, the hottest summer (June through August) on record. Period.
Oh, and p.s.: just to put that in context, January through June 2010 represented the hottest six months on record for the planet, and barring a total surprise, 2010 will be the hottest year on record following the hottest decade on record.
And p.p.s.: check out this list of Republican climate-change deniers battling for Senate seats, all of whom are ready to take the pose of cartoon ostriches and many of whom may -- heads in the sand and butts up -- actually take their places in the next Senate. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute suggested that Xtreme weather events should be named for these guys (just as we now name hurricanes for generic human beings). The fact is, though, that such denial -- and so lack of action -- goes way beyond the official deniers which is why, I suspect, future generations will look back on much of the global leadership class as a criminal crew, not just for what they actively did in the world, including the requisite wars and other nightmares they were involved in, but for what they didn’t do, for looking the other way when our planet was in real trouble. We’re talking about the sorts of people who, on hearing the first cries of “fire” in a crowded movie theater, buy another bag of popcorn and search for a better seat.
Bill McKibben, the creator of 350.org as well as the author of the indispensable book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is made of different stuff, as those who have read his regular dispatches at this site know. He’s also the Energizer Bunny of climate change averters. He never seems to stop. Tom
My Road Trip With a Solar Rock Star
Or Notes on the Enthusiasm Gap
By Bill McKibbenI got to see the now-famous enthusiasm gap up close and personal last week, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Both Nick Turse and I have new books out which provide the inspiration for today’s post. For the latest review of mine, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, by Mamoon Alabassi at Middle East online, click here. (“As editor of TomDispatch.com, Engelhardt has provided a pioneering platform to a number of illuminating articles... But excellent editors are not necessarily outstanding authors. The American Way of War shows that Engelhardt is among the exceptions.”) For a host of other reviews, click here. Nick’s invaluable book, The Case for Withdrawal From Afghanistan, includes essays by a wonderful list of TomDispatch favorites and others, including Tariq Ali, Andrew Bacevich, Malalai Joya, Chalmers Johnson, Ann Jones, and Robert Dreyfuss. Remarkably enough, it’s the only book around that, as its title indicates, advocates the eerily missing option in Washington’s Afghanistan War policy. Just published, it’s a must for your bookshelf. Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, calls it "a pathbreaking synthesis... on the illusions of empire and the impossibility of 'victory' in Afghanistan. As the contributors so eloquently emphasize, the only realistic and humane option can be spelled in three letters: O-U-T." And here’s a modest reminder: If you are already a regular visitor to Amazon.com, think about starting to make a habit of going to it via TomDispatch book links or book-cover links. If you do so, no matter what you buy -- from books this site recommends to DVDs, cameras, Kindles, and computers -- we get a cut of your purchase (at no cost to you). Many of you are already doing this and, believe me, it’s helping to keep us afloat! Tom]
The American Way of War Quiz
This Was the War Month That Was (Believe It or Not)
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
Yes, it would be funny if it weren’t so grim. After all, when it comes to squandering money and resources in strange and distant places (or even here at home), you can count on the practitioners of American-style war to be wildly over the top.
Oh, those madcap Pentagon bureaucrats and the zany horde of generals and admirals who go with them! Give them credit: no one on Earth knows how to throw a war like they do -- and they never go home.
In fact, when it comes to linking “profligate” to "war," with all the lies, manipulations, and cost overruns that give it that proverbial pizzazz, Americans should stand tall. We are absolutely #1!
Hence, the very first TomDispatch American Way of War Quiz. Admittedly, it covers only the last four weeks of war news you wouldn’t believe if it weren’t in the papers, but we could have done this for any month since October 2001.
Now’s your chance to pit your wits (and your ability to suspend disbelief) against the best the Pentagon has to offer -- and we’re talking about all seventeen-and-a-half miles of corridors in that five-sided, five-story edifice that has triple the square footage of the Empire State Building. To weigh your skills on the TomDispatch Scales of War™, take the 11-question pop quiz below, checking your answers against ours (with accompanying explanations), and see if you deserve to be a four-star general, a gun-totin’ mercenary, or a mere private.
You’ve undoubtedly had the experience of pulling on a tiny, fraying thread and discovering, to your shock, that the larger piece of clothing you’re wearing suddenly begins to unravel. The equivalent seems to be happening in Afghanistan right before our eyes. There, “the pride of Afghanistan's financial system,” Kabul Bank, with more than a million customers, is undergoing a slow-motion collapse.
Part of a fledging banking system proudly mentored by American experts and Treasury Department officials, that sinkhole of a bank now threatens to take down far more with it. In 2001, according to the Washington Post’s David Nakamura and Ernesto Londoño, the Americans arriving in Kabul wanted to create a “Western-style banking sector... that would make it more difficult for terrorists to get money, while promising Afghans that a regulated financial system would be more reliable and trustworthy.” And, in a perverse sense, they succeeded.
We don’t yet know whether or not Kabul Bank is “too big to fail” and so will prove to be the Goldman Sachs or the Merrill Lynch of poverty-stricken Afghanistan. At the very least, it represents a fraying Afghan cloth woven from just about every disastrous thread of the American war and occupation: the deep corruption of the ruling elite, the looting of what wealth the country has and its squandering abroad, the tens of billions of dollars of drug money and reconstruction/aid funds that have washed over a land with a gross domestic product of only about $27 billion, and finally Washington's whole project in Afghanistan, which, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse indicates below, promised so much and delivered so desperately little. (Of course, the very fact that the Taliban, the discredited former rulers of that country in 2001, should be experiencing a renaissance, tells you everything you need to know about the American disaster there.)
To provide protection for themselves in the snake pit of Afghan politics, the Kabul Bank’s two owners brought in (that is, bought) a brother of President Hamid Karzai (who has been living in a $5.5 million villa in Dubai purchased with bank funds) and a brother of Vice President Muhammad Fahim (to whom it loaned a mere $100 million). Its top officers also evidently loaned out millions to themselves, splurged on 18 “villas” and other property in Dubai just as the real estate market there was preparing to take a nosedive, while playing fast and loose with the bank's deposits. Since Kabul Bank holds government funds for salaries to be paid to the Army, police, government workers, and teachers, the possibility for popular discontent runs deep. In Kabul, the only remaining branch of the bank still open is now surrounded by barbed wire, and guarded by security forces prepared to beat back Afghans besieging the place desperate for their money or simply their salaries.
The Kabul Bank collapse is a genuine Afghan nightmare that threatens to engulf the major politicians of that land and possibly the rickety, rotting political system the Americans helped build over the last decade. It may, in the end, prove a symbol of everything the American war delivered to a tiny slice of Afghan society and almost no one else. Nick Turse’s newest book -- he’s the editor -- The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), is just out and how could it be more timely? The impressive war reporter Patrick Cockburn calls it "a fascinating and essential guide." As we watch the American project in that country unravel, isn’t it the moment to finally put withdrawal on the American agenda? After all, we don’t really need to oversee the collapse of Afghanistan’s banking system when we’ve done so well here at home.
(To catch Turse in Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview discussing why withdrawal from Afghanistan hasn't been on the American agenda , click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
How Much “Success” Can Afghans Stand?
The American War and Afghanistan’s Civilians
By Nick TurseWith the arrival of General David Petraeus as Afghan War commander, there has been ever more talk about the meaning of “success” in Afghanistan. At the end of July, USA Today ran an article titled, “In Afghanistan, Success Measured a Step at a Time.” Days later, Stephen Biddle, a Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, held a conference call with the media to speak about “Defining Success in Afghanistan.” A mid-August editorial in the Washington Post was titled: “Making the Case for Success in Afghanistan.” And earlier this month, an Associated Press article appeared under the headline, “Petraeus Talks Up Success in Afghan War.”
Call it strange or call it symptomatic. These last weeks, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has been on a “media blitz.” He’s been giving out interviews as if they were party favors. Yet, as far as I can tell, not a single interviewer has asked him anything like: “General Petraeus, twenty percent of Pakistan, which supposedly harbors Osama bin Laden and various militant groups involved in the Afghan War, and whose intelligence agency reportedly has an ongoing stake in the Afghan Taliban, is now underwater. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and so U.S. supply lines have been swept away. How do you expect this cataclysm to affect the Afghan War in the short and long term?”
In these last weeks, the Afghan War has once again been front-page news. Yet only a single reporter -- the heroic Carlotta Gall of the New York Times -- has thought to focus on the subject of how the Biblical-style floods in Pakistan might affect the U.S. war effort and the overstretched supply lines that play a major role in supporting U.S. troops there. While you could learn about rising violence in Afghanistan, the perilous state of the Kabul Bank, and many other subjects, reporting on the floods and the war has been nil, with even speculative pieces on the subject largely nonexistent.
We know next to nothing about how U.S. supplies are now getting to Afghanistan, or how much the cost of getting them there has risen, or how this might affect U.S. operations in that country. Given the scale of the catastrophe and the degree to which the U.S. is embedded in the region, you might at least expect the American media to be flooded with commentary on what the event could mean for us. Think again. As Juan Cole (who runs Informed Comment, which offers the best running commentary available on the Middle East and whose most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World) indicates, this startling journalistic blank spot is just a modest part of a far larger blankness when it comes to one of the truly horrific weather events in modern memory. Don't miss Cole discussing flooded Pakistan on the latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here. Tom
The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened
Don’t Tune In, It’s Not Important
By Juan ColeThe Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security. Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness.
[Note to TomDispatch readers: We’re back, well rested and ready to roll. As of today, the offer of a signed Chalmers Johnson book in return for a contribution to this site is over, but I wanted to thank those of you who contributed so generously. What a difference it makes to us! In addition, TomDispatch readers bought my new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, Johnson’s just published Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, and Andrew Bacevich’s latest bestseller, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War -- catch the superb New York Times review of the book by clicking here -- off TD book links in striking numbers. As long as you arrive at Amazon via those links and buy anything, book or otherwise, we get a small percentage of your purchase, and this month it really added up. TomDispatch writers and other toilers at this website will benefit greatly and we thank you. Those of you who haven’t picked up my book or either of the others can still get all three packaged together at a good price by visiting any of their Amazon pages. And if you want to catch me discussing the new military/media landscape in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here. Tom]
Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?
The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence
By Tom Engelhardt
The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post “sometime in 2011.” The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates’s views, they read: “He favors substantial increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global military presence.”
Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still call “foreign policy.” Remind me: When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase -- part of a superannuated world in which “diplomats” and “diplomacy” were considered important -- in a meaningful way? These days “foreign policy” and “global policy” are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called “the Greater Middle East,” where what’s at stake is neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."
As a result, Gates’s message couldn’t be clearer: despite two disastrous wars and a global war on terror now considered “multigenerational” by those in the know, trillions of lost dollars, and staggering numbers of deaths (if you happen to include Iraqi and Afghan ones), the U.S. military mustn’t in any way slack off. The option of reducing the global mission -- the one that’s never on the table when “all options are on the table” -- should remain nowhere in sight. That’s Gates’s bedrock conviction. And when he opposes any diminution of the global mission, it matters.
Slicing Up the World Like a Pie
As we know from a Peter Baker front-page New York Times profile of Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, the 49-year-old president “with no experience in uniform” has “bonded” with Gates, the 66-year-old former spymaster, all-around-apparatchik, and holdover from the last years of the Bush era. Baker describes Gates as the president’s “most important tutor,” and on matters military like the Afghan War, the president has reportedly “deferred to him repeatedly.”
